Has Matthew Weiner just given up altogether? Lexicographer Ben Zimmer noticed yesterday that on Sunday’s episode of Mad Men, sitting on a shelf behind Sterling Cooper’s CFO Lane Pryce was the three-volume edition of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which, as everyone knows, was first published in 1987 — 24 years after the show’s current season supposedly takes place.

Fans of AMC’s Mad Men know that the set decorators are usually slavishly faithful to the look and style of the early ’60s. But Sunday’s episode contained a glaring (and uncharacteristic) anachronism, as my friend, the lexicographer Ben Zimmer, noted yesterday on his Word Routes blog.